It came! Started to see some Americans say they got their copy of Upon A Twice Time but I just figured mine would be a while yet. Did you know Americans get mail on Saturday? Weird! I think we did too but not in my lifetime. And my lifetime stretches back a ways now. Anyway, I took a themed photo of the book next to a flower to go with my story, Megaflora, which is written in the genre of Victorian travelogue and  mashes together Jack and the Beanstalk with the creepy and relatively unknown fairy tale "The Queen of the Planets". 

I originally had the idea of mixing Jack and the Beanstalk with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the genre was still the Victorian travelogue idea. I’ve always had this thing I would say at work when someone was tempted to do something stupid (that someone was often me)- Some things aren’t worth going to hell for.  Seemed like a good idea to explore in the context of Orpheus, and I wanted to mix it up and make Eurydice the brave soul who goes to retrieve their lover. But a quick check with Air and Nothingness confirmed that myths didn’t count as fairy tale, and so I was happy to move on with my life. Oh well, right? 

But. 

The editor tweeted at me that he was eager to see what I came up with. Urg! Now I had to write something! Urg!!! But also, so thankful. Let me say working with Todd Sanders, the publisher and editor was absolutely wonderful and a real pleasure and honour. Without that encouragement I would never have written Megaflora. And it was relatively easy to reconfigure as I just imagined that this was the next episode in that same travelogue, so that Orpheus- Sir Orphean here- had already had his misadventure and Lady Eurydice had decided to travel on. It took some digging to find a good fairy tale to use as the second ingredient for the mashup, but a friend pointed me to the whole online catalogue with ATU numbers and everything and I found The Queen of the Planets and …. Voila! Megaflora.

Oh- and that first story never got written but I did scribble a few things down as a rough prototype and one paragraph I did like and regret not getting to use - 

The locals have a name for the type of cloud that obscures the top of the beanstalk, in translation the expression loses something, but it is rendered, roughly, ‘Steam from the giant’s cauldron.’ They say that the thickness of the clouds is an indicator of how many Englishmen the giants are cooking.

And finally, the name for this fictional country they were traveling in, where the beanstalk is situated, I don’t think it made the cut, but it made me laugh. So, for posterity, I can tell you it was Hanselvania. Enjoy!

Update: another of the authors in the book, Rebecca Hardy, made a playlist for every story in the anthology! Very cool!